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It's called personal responsibility. She's playing the little victim game when she should just accept what she did and pay the fine.
Are you serious? She was stopped at a traffic light and wanted to see what time it was. That's hardly a menace to society transgression. Good thing you're not a judge. You'd put people in jail for 20 years for the most trivial offenses. Some people have absolutely no common sense and see the whole world in black and white terms.
Exactly. Two of my cars have the most distracting systems. I can drive down the highway happily texting and scrolling through apps and messages all day long without touching a phone, but I don't because it's still distracting. The voice commands and keyboard to do these things is ridiculously complicated and requires you to navigate with a mouse thing on one car (touch on another). It's distracting and I don't do it for this reason. Fortunately the screen on one car is at the top, but on another one it's right in the middle of the center stack.
What's funny is that this system lets you look up stuff on all sorts of apps, go through screen pages and drill down menus to play music and see stations, and it's not even that intuitive so it's a huge distraction. But at the same time, the car prevents you from changing the most simplistic vehicle settings, updating destinations, or viewing a weather forecast with one click, because that stuff gets grayed out when the car moves.
Even better is the gas prices app. It lets you scroll through five screen pages at highway speed, then after you got that far, says you can't view any more unless you pull over safely. I just looked through 5 screen pages and NOW I have to pull over?
Here's another thing. The system puts on a message that says you can't access whatever until you stop safely. But how does the car know you pulled over safely and didn't just stop in the middle of the interstate?
Get Gas Buddy. Just use the "I'm a passenger" function. Works great at 65 mph. Don't ask me how I know.
And just think how you would find it if knee-jerk reactionists managed to make glancing at your wristwatch a major offense punishable with a $500 fine.
Her case is an example of a Good Thing taken to Extreme because brain-dead absolutists cannot discern the difference from the extremely dangerous act of texting while driving in traffic from the benign act of checking the time while at a complete stop.
STOP IT!!! You're making too much sense. Haven't you ever heard of zero tolerance?
Wow! I can't believe the responses. I have bluetooth in my car so use that for phone calls, but I do use the phone for Google Maps. Sometimes I use the map on my car's GPS navigation, but that's much more distracting than using the phone's mapping, since it's always on and only one click away from the mapping function to my next destination.
I did have an accident last year while looking at my phone's map, but it was because I'd pulled to the side of the street and parked (in a parking zone) to look at the map. Someone hit me from behind and did $10K damage to my car! So much for stopping to look at the map!
And the OP was stopped. It was no different than looking at a pocket watch while stopped.
Except that it's apparently against the law where she was driving. I'm glad that kind of police activity isn't practiced in my state!
Same here in Alaska. I get the impression all of these zero tolerance types live on the left coast, the NE corridor or some other intolerant enclave.
Are you serious? She was stopped at a traffic light and wanted to see what time it was. That's hardly a menace to society transgression. Good thing you're not a judge. You'd put people in jail for 20 years for the most trivial offenses. Some people have absolutely no common sense and see the whole world in black and white terms.
Your basing that on her story. For all we know she was talking on it and the cop saw her. All we know is what she told us.
And yes in this case it is black and white; you break a law, you suffer the consequences. Why is that so hard for people to understand?
Can you give me a few examples where Zero Tolerance policies actually worked?
I'll bet that kid who was suspended from school because the way he ate his pop tart won't ever eat one again in such a manner as to be construed as an assault weapon.
OP wasn't parked.
Being parked at a red light would be dangerous and illegal, so the OP is due a ticket no matter what.
Tell the rest of us, in manner that makes you seem reasonably intelligent, what is wrong with checking the time while stopped at a red light. I have a watch I can look at. Some people don't.
You don't have to agree but it is still true. If you told me in your opinion you drive better after two drinks than you do without drinking studies would suggest otherwise even if you don't believe it.
Every ticket and accident I have ever had has been while I was stone cold sober. So I must be a better driver after drinking, because I have never had an accident with alcohol in my system.
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